The present invention relates to methods for producing products with reduced environmental “footprints”. Such methods appear particularly useful in formulating consumer products such as cleaning chemicals, air care products, and home insecticides.
Many consumers have a preference for products which have (or are at least perceived by them to have) lesser adverse environmental impacts than other competing products. This is evidenced by the growth of the “organic” foods market, and the labeling of products with markings such as “environmentally friendly” or “green”.
Apart from consumer preferences for environmentally friendly products, governments are increasingly regulating from an environmental standpoint the content of products, and in certain cases the additional responsibilities of companies during their manufacture, transportation and disposal. To insure the widest distribution and acceptance of their products, manufacturers therefore have good reason to take into account a wide variety of differing environmental legal requirements.
There are also other significant business reasons for formulating products with reduced environmental impacts. One such additional reason is to reduce the potential for future litigation if certain chemicals are mishandled (e.g. avoiding Superfund type issues).
The art has therefore begun to develop a number of different techniques for taking into account environmental issues when formulating products and acquiring their raw materials. In one approach the art has developed a public “grading system” of suppliers insofar as their environmental practices are concerned.
If a component is purchased from a company that follows strict environmental protection procedures, the impact on the environment from buying from that company may well be less than if the component is purchased from a company having a history of improper waste disposal. The environmental history of raw material supplier companies, and their current environmental procedures, are being taken into account by various agencies that assign suppliers environmental grades. These grades are made available to purchasing managers, who (all other things being equal or roughly equal) may make purchasing decisions based thereon.
Also known in the art are grading systems which grade possible adverse environmental effects of the resulting products. For example, the art has made a combined environmental impact ranking which factors in a variety of information such as defined toxicity criteria. Such systems are also known to be associated with certain seals of approval by organizations having a perceived objective reputation regarding environmental matters.
However, these prior art systems typically grade a particular component without taking into account that a given component may have significantly different environmental impacts depending on the type of product it is to be used in, and what that product is to be used for. For example, phosphate used in a consumer cleaner intended to be flushed into the drain water supply by consumers would normally be perceived as environmentally undesirable due to foaming problems in rivers and the like, and the tendency of phosphates to increase undesired plant growth. However, the presence of a phosphate in certain industrial cleaners that are typically disposed in other ways could well have little adverse environmental impact.
Also known are systems which adjust the grades of input components of a product by their relative weight in that product. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,933,765 discloses an environmental grading system in which a product containing multiple components has each of its input components provided with a numerical score based on factors such as toxicity, ingredient bans, and legislative concerns. Each component is compared to a single published limit (such as a Dutch PPT Telecom standard) and a numerical value for that component is assigned.
The scores are then weighted based on the relative percentage weight of the raw material to provide an overall score for the resulting product. Again, only one possible score is provided for a given raw material chemical, regardless of application, albeit that score is weighted by prominence in the final product.
Thus, prior art environmental grading or rating systems do not provide an optimal system for formulating products, especially when a company develops a wide variety of different types of products having different applications, and some chemicals are used in more than one type of product.
To be commercially viable over the long term a product must meet certain cost and performance criteria, regardless of environmental attributes. Thus, in some cases environmental grading will not be the deciding factor. However, it is desired that a better system be developed for evaluating the environmental impact of chemical components and for formulating products having improved environmental characteristics for any given cost and performance criteria. Moreover, even where there are some differences in cost and performance between competing proposed formulas, such an improved environmental grading system is still desired as that will at minimum more meaningfully advise the formulator as to the nature of the trade-offs.